Question, how much memory does each card have? Does it make a big diff with Doom3 if you have 128mb vs. 256mb? I'm asking becuase there is a huge price difference between a 6800 128mb and a 6800 256mb.Reply

GREAT article guys. After playing it for a couple days, I agree 100% with what was said. Awesome game, brilliant developing by Carmack and his team. There's not a game I'd rather be playing right now... some people aren't impressed by it... because they filled their head with hype about how it will be revolutionary and a breakthrough in gaming. While it's not quite THAT amazing, it is in my opinion, easily the best looking game you can buy today... including Far Cry.Reply

Maybe I'm missing something, or I'm just uneducated with PCI-Express. But shouldn't PCI-E be involved in testing? If thats the way the graphics slot standard is headed, why havent they produced high perofmrance cards like the 6800 for that platform? And what is everyones feeligns about being left int he dust with your $500 AGP card in a couple months "IF" PCI-E is debuted with something better? Like a majority I'm faced with having to buy a whole new system for this game, but I dont want to jsut put something together to play this game NOW, I want it for games LATER as well. Just dont want to make the mistake of sinking the dough into a technology where in a few months the possibility of something far greater is bound. (I know its the hate-love relationship with advancing technology)Reply

I made a slight mistake earlier when I said the console command to show the framerate while playing is "con_showfps 1", it is actually "com_showfps 1". Sorry.

#57- my CPU is actually a slightly overclocked XP 1700+ which I've ran at 1800+ speeds ever since I built this box. I did try overclocking my Ti4200 to Ti4400 speeds (275/550), which is well within its maximum possible overclock without any visible corruption (290/580).

As you'd expect, a faster graphics card did next to nothing for my framerate at 640x480 as that was pretty much CPU limited. The 10% gfx overclock only raised the framerate of the 640x480 low quality mode by 1%, from 31.4 fps to 31.7fps. I doubt even a 6800 Ultra could manage more than 33fps with my CPU, mobo, and memory. So an XP 1800+ on a KT266A mobo has a roughly 33fps ceiling regardless of graphics card or mode.

At 1024x768 medium quality, the 21.2fps at 250/500 was raised by a healthy 8% to 22.9fps with the 250/550 overclock of 10%, so a faster graphics card would in my system would definitely push that a lot higher, probably close to 33fps. Increasing core speed alone had a greater impact than memory alone, at 275/500 I measured 22.2fps, while at 250/550 I got 21.8fps. If you've got any GeForce4 Ti series card (even an overclocked Ti4600), regardless of your CPU I'd recommend running at 800x600 in Medium quality mode, or possibly High quality mode with Aniso disabled though you're unlikely to see much difference and theres always the risk of texture swapping at some point.Reply

Between the High Quality at 1024x768 graph and the High Quality at 800x600 graph (in the Low End performance analysis), you can see that the 5700U and 9600XT scale a little more than 10fps when dropping res. This number is bigger for higher performance cards. We should have included a couple of last years high end cards in that graph. Sorry for the omission.Reply

I sure would have liked a comparison for ALL the mentioned cards in a few of the different settings side by side. The idea that you can choose what card is right for you can't both be expressed by visual quality and frames per second in three seperate teers.

What I'd like is to see what the best card for the buck is going to be that will run the game around 60fps in 800x600 with all graphical nicities on. As it is now, I have to just make a judgement call on what the Mid-Range results show, even though the difference in performance between 800x and 1024x are likely to differ in the 10-20 fps level, if I am assuming correctly.

I love the article, but it would be nice to simply find 'how' I want to play the game, and then see what performs best at those settings. Maybe it's just that none of their settings match what I think is really important. :(Reply

I should add that those framerates were measured by doing four runs at each resolution and quality setting, discarding the first run, then taking an average of the other three (they were very consistent and only varied by one tenth of an fps between the second, third and fourth runs). High quality really was marginally faster than Medium, when Aniso was off.Reply

There is no real difference in framerate on a 128MB Ti4200 between Low, Medium, or High quality, except for the 8x Aniso used in High quality mode which cripples older generation cards. Force Aniso off and you can use High quality with no drop in framerate. The optimum balance of resolution and framerate for my system while playing was 800x600 which played surprisingly well and looked a lot better than I expected.Reply

Actually, GF4MX has no shader support, so its not at all like the GF3. Last card without shader support was GF2s. I was right, according to nVidias website, the only thing it has over the GF2MX is antialiasing... And maybe their light speed memory architecture, video processing engine (DVD) and nView, although I dont know it the GF2MX had that or not.Reply

From various stories that I have read regarding framerates in Doom 3, I was under the impression that it was going to be capped at 60 fps. However there is a couple of time that some cards break 70 and even 100!Reply

I think it is about time to benchmark using common resolution settings. Most people with LCD screens want to run their games at the native
1280x1024 resolution of their LCDs.
So, will my 128MB radeon 9700 (non pro) be able to run the game at 1280x1024 ? Anyone who knows ?
/Xtian
Reply

Why do you guys want to see the benchmarks on a gf4 4200 and ati 8500.
4200 is slightly underclock 4400 so subtract a few framerates and the ati 8500 should perform better then a ati 9200 since it has a higher core and memory speed.
Also i think the old geforce3 and geforce3 ti 500 is much better then a geforce fx 5200 and is equilivalent to a 5200 ultra and 5600 just under a geforce4 4200.Reply

in response to the laptop question, if it burned out a vid card, don't play with it sitting on your lap...geez.

Seriously tho, the thinkpads are an awesome line...the only way to go imo. You might want to wait until the mobility 9800s come out if you want a real desktop replacement for gaming...don't know if they'll show up in the thinkpad line anytime soon (or at all). I know there was a news clip a while back on anandtech about it, you might want to dig and find that.Reply

You have a Geforce 6800 ontperforming a X800XTPE by about 70% on the top graph "high quality med res" also theX800 Pro scores are identical to the R9800 Pro. Maybe you have left a higher quality setting on with the X800s (AA or something)

Gibhunter: Geforce4 MX is nothing like a GF3 TI 200. GF4 MX offers a similar featureset as the GF2 and pretty much the GF256 before it, however it has a better memory controller and so offers performance similar to the higher end Geforce2s ie Pro and Ultra. GF3 offers PS and VS.

Reflex: JC always said that Doom3 targeted the Gefore256s featureset. However that does not mean the Geforce256s performance of course.Reply

"John Carmack has spoken of possible issues when overclocking a graphics card with Doom 3,"
sounds like Mr C is trying to excuse his code bloat (to me).
what happened to "voodoo 3 2000 will be able to run doom 3 fine"?Reply

on my system 2.4@3.3/1GB/5900(128) the game plays very nicely with everything maxed (AA off) at 1024x768. the game is very good, especially in terms of atmosphere and graphics, the sound isn't as good as i think it could've been, but still very nice. also some issue with it not seeing 7.1 setups as surround, have to downgrade in windows to 5.1.

worth teh wait i think, at least singleplayer is, don't really care about the multiplayer from this type of genre so won't try it.Reply

#27, GF4MX is more like GF3 Ti 200. GF2MX was more on par with the original Geforce video card.

I am interested to see if the Radeon 9200 loses any frames per second on a slower CPU. My guess is that it doesn't take a very powerful cpu to max it out hence it should hover right around 20fps on even a P4 2GHz.Reply

I have a laptop with a AMD mobile 64 3200 and a ATI mobility 9600 with 64 mb. I have been using it for ganes until my x800 gets here. Only been playing doom 3 for about 4 hours. It seems to run fine, not as good as a desktop but playable.Reply

Yeah, I'll be fine, but I don't want to run at 640x480. I do have DDR, but only 256. This definately reminds me of the old days when I wanted to play Turok with my Riva128 card on my AMD K75 (or something like that). The minimum spec back then was really minimum spec and it seems the same here. I don't like being on the low-end so I'll probably build up a A64 system with some decent video card.

I just think this is great. D3 will hopefully be the shot in the arm to get everybody back to spending money in the PC market. I just hope Matrox, S3 and others jump back in the frey again.Reply

I am currently looking at buying a IBM Thinkpad T42 with a 64mb 9600m and I want it to play Doom3 and HL2 (Maybe not great, but playable.) I really want to move to a mobile solution to replace my desktop, but I still want to play a game from time to time and I think that if I can find a notebook that can play Doom3 and HL2 it will handle most of the new games for the next year or more. Any chance of benchmarking some notebooks with mid range cards in the next round of tests?Reply

"Actually, your XP1700 is just fine (at the low end) The min spec is a 1.5 MHz Intel or roughly a XP1500+"

Actually, because that 1.5 GHz Intel is a Pentium 4 adn his XP 1700+ is a 1.4 GHz Athlon. In comparison he's about 500 Willamette MHz ahead of the minimum with that chip. So, yeah, he's set as you said depending on Doom 3's memory bandwidth requirement which could play an important role.

However, with a minimum such as a 1.5 GHz Pentium 4 you also have to consider what such ancient machines could have in them, namely the possible crippling SDRAM.Reply

it was my understanding that the GF4MX = GF2MX + AA. I'm surprised it would even work. It's funny that Carmack says GF4MX is ok when GF2MX isnt, if you dont have antialiasing on, your not ganing much. Maybe if its on a smaller process or something...

Do you happen to have a GeForce 4 MX (64 MB) to try? Since they said it should be playable with that card, I was curious to know how that would compare to the cards you have listed (more specifically, the Radeon 9200 and FX 5700).

Thanks!

Good comparison though, appreciate the hard work and loss of sleep. You should get some rest. :)Reply

why did you pick the 4400 as the low end nvidia? why not run a more mainstreme card like TNT2s or Intel? Or Rage 128? thats what most customers have, right? Maybe some GF2 MX. The funny thing is that new computers at best buy come with this sort of shit up until recently. Although intel seems to be managing this still.

Where did they marketing for the intel graphics come from? Extremely what? shitty? slow? worthless?

Maybe they should have called it intel:
abysmal
usable
painful
weak
worth-less-than-the-sylicon-its-printed-on
... grpahics.Reply

If I'm not mistaken, the 9550 is not the same as a 9500 Pro. I think that you're right that it is a underclocked 9600, which would mean only 4 pipes. The 9500 Pro is exactly like the 9700 Pro except with only a 128-bit memory bus.

I have a 9500 Pro, and am extremely intrested in seeing how the 8 pipes of the 9500 Pro match up to the 4 Pipe + Higher clock speed of the 9600 series.

I have no real intrest in Doom 3, so I've been looking for those benchmarks, but every frame rate report I've read so far just skips from the 9200 to the 9600, ignoring the 9500, even though its a very different GPU from the 9600.

we looked at doing a radeon 9550 ... if you absolute want it (and ask in the next 10 minutes) I may just sit down and run the card. From our understanding, its just and underclocked 9600 pro, which would likely put it at running medium quality at 640x480 to get by. Reply

Wow ... ummm ... I had no idea that this thing would post the article page by page as I entered it into the engine ... Not working on much sleep makes one overlook certain important options in the engine I suppose.

Sorry about that guys. Hopefully I won't be doing any all night benchmark-the-game-the-day-it-comes-out articles for a while and I can leave the posting to our wonderfully talented Managing Editor.Reply